ICS Working Papers Nº1/2014

ICS

W O R K I N G P A P E R S

2014

to motivate sponsors. Even though women face far less (and little privileged) options

for a full-time career in the football realm, they are not to be dissuaded neither from

the game nor from their professional ambitions. Their ambition and determination, on

the one hand, and the shortage of professional contracts, on the other, elevate the

geographical mobility of players – and themselves as actors – to the central element in

a dynamic triangle of global production, popularity and mobility. This is precisely owed

to the insipient globalisation process of the discipline which might accelerate after

WWC 2011 and its recent media-documented breakthrough in popularity. Yet it is

exactly the deficits in those two pivots of the triangle that depend not on the women

themselves, but highly on investments by the sports-media-business alliance (i.e.

production and popularity), which appear to lag behind the commitment and personal

investments of the players.

Acknowledgments

This study was funded by the Portuguese Foundation of Science and Technology as

part of the project “Imagining the Modern Portugal? The role of football among

Portuguese migrants in six diasporic settings ( www.diasbola.com ) and continues in

progress under the title “Moving with the Ball: The globalization of women’s football”,

funded by the João Havelange Research Grant 2012-2013.

I thank Vera Botelho for our inspiring discussions on new arising research questions on

the globalization on women’s football at the time of the FIFA Women’s World Cup

2011. Her in-depth reading of the literature on sports globalization was of major

guidance not only for our joint papers-in-progress but also helped to synthesise

respective theories in form of the dynamic triangle of global stage, global production

and global mobility.

Notes

[1] The FIFA women’s ranking of December 2011 listed 136 countries. This

number varies and has been higher in previous years (up to 168). National

squads which remain inactive for a number of years drop out. Based on the

27